Get That Out of Your Mouth #3

Deliver Us From Evil: The Songs of Milo Jones

From the heavy tone and rich drawl of his voice, you expect Milo Jones to be a noir alt-country singer, the kind that can casually sing about taking a life, crackling with a wicked sense of humor. But then he’ll turn to a sweeter tone-- a late-night croon like a voice on the radio, playing because you've got a date over, or maybe because you don't. It's so engrossing that when the song ends, you have to ask: what the hell has he just done with the Ronettes' "Be My Baby"?

Nobody sounds like Milo Jones. From his unique voice to the rigorous way he arranges and performs his repertoire, he's one of the most remarkable musicians tackling "the American songbook", the classic popular and country songs that span eras and styles. Jones has recorded everyone from Iggy Pop and Johnny Paycheck to Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hammerstein, has covered saccharine weepers from the 60s and recorded a stunning set of Christmas music. The songs he's written climb to elegiac heights or unfold perfect ballads, with a few murder stories along the way.

And he's one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, as I discovered when I sat down to interview him in his adopted hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts. As he puts it, "I'm a sensitive ding-a-ling across the board."

Though on record he comes off like an old soul, he's less intimidating in person; his voice is higher than the range at which he sings, his Southern accent a little sharper. He seems to be on one side or the other of thirty, though he says he's "fifty-nine", and he's grown a mustache that gives him a more "grizzly" look than his first album's cover photos, fitting for the rougher direction he's taken on his fifth and latest self-released album.

Jones grew up in the South, in North Carolina. His father was a civil engineer who went into restaurants and life insurance, his mother is a teacher turned antiques dealer, and he spent some time out in the country with his grandparents. "My grandparents are a pretty big influence on me, just the way they talked, their ‘cute Southern charm'-- you know, weird attitudes," he says. "And it really rubbed off on me-- there was a certain appeal to a lot of the redneck behavior. In high school, I was laughing at a lot of the kids, but at the same time there was definitely something there that kind of appealed to me, the more vulgar ways they behaved I guess. One summer I worked in tobacco and had to work with all these farm boys; I was behind enemy lines, but I guess I'd made a few friends by the end of it. They brainwashed me with their vile one-upsmanship, but I went into recluse mode with my guitar when it was over."

Jones took up the guitar seriously at age sixteen, and at the end of high school he decided to attend a proper music school. To halfway placate his parents-- who "hated" the idea-- he auditioned to study classical guitar in his home state before moving to Boston to attend what he calls "The Berklee School of Guitar for Boys." It's with reluctance that Jones admits that he went to Berklee College of Music, a school that has turned out many great jazz and rock musicians, as well as a legion of long-haired metalheads playing through effects racks the size of refrigerators. By contrast, Jones' guitar isn't even that big.

"I had some real thoughtful and sincere teachers at Berklee. Still, it was a messy place and I tried to put it in order for myself," sitting in on some classes at the New England Conservatory, playing in different ensembles, taking in hours of theory and woodshedding. "Learning how to understand the harmonies in American music or jazz-- that part of it was really important to me." But although he played in jazz ensembles at school, he eschews it now: "Learning how to be an improviser that can noodle like a maniac all day long, I don't know, I kind of gave up on that. I don't really have the constitution for that, I think I'm more of an arranger."

Jones stayed in Boston after college, and played around town in punk bands like the Jose Fist (influenced by the Jesus Lizard and Jon Spencer, as well as the Vex Volts, who played more "old-fashioned" music. "I started to realize how I really wanted to sing in the Vex Volts. Stylistically I was singing sort of cabaret-Broadwayish in that band, but I started cutting some of that out and tried to be more natural."

Around that time he also cut his first solo record, Ballads, in 1995. On Ballads he played standards like "Who's Sorry Now" and "I'll Be Seeing You", along with left-field choices like Mingus' "Eclipse" and the "Mommy Dear" song from the Sam Fuller film Naked Kiss. Although it had a darker, dreamier quality than his later albums, it introduced the style he has today: his low, rough register and suggestion of a Southern accent gives him the edge of a country singer, yet he can veer into a cool tone, with lines veering off into a dreamy lilt, smoky but sweet. And there's an ambiguous tone in the way he bends his strings just a little, or stretches and distorts his vowels in a warble-- what a friend of mine calls "playing in the key of Milo."

He recorded Ballads himself; he still mainly records at home, solo, on an ancient Power Mac with a ribbon mike that "warms up the digital sterility." Aside from a stint with a trio (heard on 2000's Absalom), that's how he's worked ever since: playing spare, beautiful arrangements of standards and originals, that pry open their emotional complexities. The selection on Ballads "was pretty much being in love with certain performers, versions of those songs, like ‘We'll Be Together Again' was Tony Bennett and Bill Evans, ‘Look of Love'-- the Dusty Springfield thing, ‘Goodbye' was Frank Sinatra." Jones addresses the stereotype about songwriting-- that old-fashioned music is "better"-- when he explains how he stopped playing punk. "I felt like I really wanted to be more of a songwriter than play in some punk rock situation. That's not saying there aren't a lot of good punk songs, but...it's not the same. I feel that's sort of a blasphemous thing to say, but learning Cole Porter songs and trying to figure out how to write pop songs from Broadway tunes and Americana, it's not the same thing. There aren't as many people trying to be songwriters per se, as there used to be," he says. "I think people just get caught up in styles and genres or whatever, and the whole idea of crafting a song-- there's just not much of it going on."

And you can't get less punk than some of the songs he's covered, like Bobby Russell's "Honey", made famous by Bobby Goldsboro during the era of "story songs". On this gold-plated weeper, the narrator sings about the love of his life and the good times they had, until the day that she up and dies. It pulls your heartstrings not just with her death, but with the corny scenes of their life together: "She wrecked the car and she got sad/ Because she thought that I'd get mad/ But, what the heck?" It was such a hit that reportedly, when Goldsboro had a television show in the 70s, he used to open by playing a few bars of that song.

Everyone I know in their thirties or older groans when they hear it, yet somehow when Jones plays it, whatever's corny or silly about the song is put in context with how affecting it is: he makes the hokier lines come out the way a regular guy would talk. In the song, "Honey" dies when "angels came," a flighty way of evading the actual disease or accident that took her life-- but because they evade it, you could take any fear you have about losing a loved one and project it on that song. "What is a good song? Is it a corny song? I don't know. It just seems to be something about being clever and then something about making a song that has some kind of personal depth." About "Honey" he remarks, "More people admit to getting a bit weepy because of that song than I'd expect," and with his version you can actually hear why: he revisits the song-- makes it more brisk, sings it a little differently-- but he doesn't condescend to it.

As seriously as he takes the music, however, he's not afraid to mess with it: under his deadpan delivery you might not notice that he's added his own verses to "Winter Wonderland", tossing in a line about putting pantyhose on a snowman. Cole Porter gets off with a little cussing (when the law caught Miss Otis, they "strung her ass up"), but Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Gentleman is a Dope" becomes "Girl's a Dope", and on "I Walk With God", our Lord's addressed as "she." You can imagine what his husky voice and new lyrics do to "My Heart Belongs to Daddy".

"When I'm singing along to the radio or just singing to myself or with friends, I jack swear words in, or otherwise vandalize the song. It's just having fun, being juvenile, whatever. A little of that hapless attitude wanders into my music, or my renditions of covers. Maybe I'll eventually get in trouble for 'personalizing' other folks' songs. That'd be a shame, because I only cover songs that I really love for one reason or other. I aim for heartfelt covers even if I do spray some graffiti here and there. Good stories and songs beg for make-overs." Jones also reveals an evil humor. He takes an interest in psychologically complicated characters, like in his cover of Johnny Paycheck's off-handedly violent "Pardon Me, I've Got Someone to Kill": "A lot of [Johnny Paycheck's songs] are from a prisoner's perspective, like borderline sociopath. Or somebody with serious emotional viruses. But they're so funny..."

Then there's the first original he recorded, "I Raise Hell", on Ballads. "I'm not so sure where that song came from," says Jones. "I sat down to make a sad country song and came up with something that hints at gay revenge instead." Mournfully slow, it starts with the line, "I raise hell, every night/ With all my friends from town/ I drive in and pick them up/ Our violence knows no bounds." The song slowly turns to scenes of almost Biblical vengeance, the lyrics growing more harrowing even as Jones' voice stays steady. Yet the sweeter sections are just as compelling: the perfect hook behind the title lyric, or the serene melody that heightens the desolation in the chorus. The song gave him a minor break: not only did it appear in Todd Verow's award-winning independent film Little Shots of Happiness, but swing revivalists the Squirrel Nut Zippers covered it at the height of their fad popularity in 1997, on their Sold Out EP. The Zippers discovered the song after Jones handed Ballads to James Mathus at one of their Boston shows. It brought a little cash and attention, though Jones has criticisms about the way they interpret the song: they folk it up and "g-rate" the lyrics, sounding more like the Country Bears than a homoerotic murder song, though he does see the irony in what happened to it, after everything he's done to Cole Porter.

The dark side of "I Raise Hell" underscores the hope he can bring to his music, which came full circle on what could be the sweetest and most remarkable record in his catalog, X-Mas 2001. His fourth record, he started working on it in the summer of that year, "and then when September 11th happened it just seemed to make even more sense." Everything that Jones can do to a song is on display here, from jacking funny lyrics into Mel Torme's "Christmas Song" to the frenzied oom-pah of "Mele Kalikimaka". While most record stores sag with over-festive or over-plastic Christmas albums and Jingle Elmo cash-ins, Jones' sincere take on these familiar songs is bracing.

The most striking songs are overtly religious, including three that he learned from Mario Lanza's Christmas album: "I Walk With God", "Guardian Angels", and Albert Hay Malotte's setting of "The Lord's Prayer" (which closes the record). Yet Jones doesn't consider himself religious. While religion becomes more politicized and in some circles, abhorred, Jones' performance of "The Lord's Prayer" feels like neutral ground. The words of the prayer are familiar to most people whether they go to church every week or only hear them at funerals or weddings, and there's an arresting humility and grace in his reading.

"Those three are definitely pretty dramatic...I don't know if the people who listen to it are going to say, ‘Oh, he's a Christian,' but I don't really care. That's not really what it's about. There may be hidden values and ironies in the words to these songs, but it's the trust in some good thing that comes across to me. And using the music to lovingly bleed that naïve hope so motherfuckers with massive faith loss can maybe get a healthful transfusion. There's lots of beautiful songs, religious or not, I need them, and if I play some of them right, maybe I'll convey some good thing that other people need as well."

When I spoke with Jones in February, he had just booked some gigs after three years of almost no live performances. He released his fifth record, Daddy's Girl, last fall, selling it at shows and through his website. He's getting press around Boston, and landed a Friday night residency through April in the new Zuzu's restaurant in Cambridge (part of the legendary Middle East Restaurant complex). In concert he has a low-key stage presence that's sometimes buffeted by waves of noise from the bar, but the melodies are just as sweet, on classic Cole Porter and on tunes he's just written-- some funny, some hymnlike. As much as this stuff is timeless, and as many reasons as people have for loving classic pop, it's even more compelling right now-- given the low-level dread in America-- to hear him sing these sad, sturdy songs. They don't explain the state of the world, but they understand what's going on in your head, sung by a weathered voice that tries to offer a little peace.